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An Experiment in Subjectivity

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“Thought about thought, an
entire tradition wider than philosophy, has taught us that thought leads us to
the deepest interiority. Speech about speech leads us to the outside in which
the speaking subject disappears. No doubt, that is why Western thought took so
long to think the being of language: as if it had a premonition of the danger
that the naked experience of language poses for the self-evidence of the ‘I
think’”.

The Oulipo, Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for
potential literature, founded in France in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François
Le Lionnais, was a group of writers who applied strict formulae to their
production. Inspired by mathematics, or a form of arithmomania, Oulipo members imposed
rules on their writing, which they saw as scaffolding and in which the content,
the subject, of their literature would be built. This scaffolding could take a
variety of forms, equations, a chess board, crosswords, lipogramms, style
variations, rhyme conventions, narrative modes. However, these structures or
strictures, or "public games", should never be obvious and often no
trace of them can be discerned in their texts. There is a myriad of complex
layers of self-imposed strictures in Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual,
and yet the plot is never fragmented, the characters never forced, the settings
hardly alien. Queneau’s The Bark Tree was a translation of Descartes’ Discourse
on Method, but nowhere can this reference be seen. Queneau said of the
scaffolding, “it would be dreadful if it showed.”

A defected surrealist, Queneau once described the Oulipo members as “rats
who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape.” This, they
believed, would spur creativity, or a special kind of creativity, one that was
as committed to a given form as it was to content, if not more. They
experimented with limits as the potential for transgression, as exercises in
the discovery of rules that may govern exceptions. Against surrealist
“automatic writing”, they saw no key to poetic revelation in the unconscious.
Language was a system, an impossible one, and OULIPO writers were gaming the
system because, for them, creation could only occur within the combinatory
possibilities language allowed.

What happens when the constraints lie in the content rather than its
form? What if the rules governing the text in advance were set by its very
meaning and the story it tells? What if the subject of the text was the
scaffolding rather than the building? Here one would approach the conditions
under which translation works. To most, the idea of translation as a creative
act is unconvincing. Translators are secretarial workers, linguistic technicians,
machine operators, and as such they are recognised by professional bodies,
government census, publishers’ contracts and the wage form. But in fact, this
second class citizenship, this constrained creativity, affords it the
possibility of experimenting with subjectivity. And this is what is most
interesting about it, and pleasurable. How so?

The anonymity of the translation act bids defiance to the authority of
authorship, individual genius and authenticity. As a work of recreation and
repetition, it exposes the sociality of discourse. The invisibility of the
translation act makes the text the real protagonist and creates language as its
persona. Undetectable and unobtrusive, the language that translation produces
is a mask that must fit without adjustments: the translator is a tailor and a
needle worker, not of garments but of skins. The subjectivity produced by and
through translation is anonymous and invisible, but also non-identitarian, set
transversally, if not beyond, the linguistic communities that are often the
currency of exchange of nation states and the glue of their imagined identity.
And yet the “cultures” that languages might demarcate are but one aspect that
the translation act needs to address; one constraint, but a negligible one. By
the very possibility of entertaining two “cultures”, or “identities”, in the
form of two languages in one’s head at any one time, the translator actually
proves how feeble this strategic alliance and alignment of language with
culture and identity really is, how arbitrary, artificial and potentially
redundant their cherished and overprotected correspondences ultimately are.

And yet to describe the subjectivity involved in translation acts one
recurs to the metaphors and heuristics of home and foreignness. But no matter
the extent to which the translator is boxed-in by the labour market and its
education industry through labels of nativity, originality, motherhood and
source; though branded at birth, the translator is in fact an orphan, at home
only when foreign. Foreign to the text, foreign to its author, foreign to the
imagined readers across borders either of them might potentially touch.
Anything short of this foreignness, anything short of this openness, anything
that subsumes the text to predictions of success or failure, will visibly
strike you as a translation. It would be dreadful if it showed. Translation is
an act of disloyalty and infidelity to the task of nation-building. To the
translator, foreignness is both familiar and familial. And whilst a symbiotic
relation to the text is necessary, this intellectual intimacy involves a form
of distance without detachment, an affinity without endorsement or signature:
in the anonymous rendering of the text in another language, the translator is
not involved in becoming the author in an act of ventriloquism, but rather in
treating the untranslated text as a character in search of an author, striving
to make it speak for itself.

The translation act is fundamentally inauthentic but involves no
betrayal. One can only speak of betrayal if authenticity entails truth as
representation. Without indulging in arguments over whether truth exists at
all, whether it does as representation, or whether it can exist exclusively as
that, in translation, at the level of the relationship between text and
authorship, truth can never represent. Language destroys this possibility and
translation only makes this more evident. So the subjectivity produced in the
translation act is also fundamentally ambiguous. We have ambiguity when “alternative
views might be taken without sheer misreading”, and translation involves a sort
of linguistic anamorphosis. One is forced to question, in translation, the
possibility of authenticity and betrayals thereof. But this level of
inauthenticity is also negligible. More importantly, perhaps, what the
translation act is inauthentic about is the authenticity one understands as a
transparency and translucency of consciousness, as a form of
being-true-to-one-self, where the term translation throws into disarray here,
much more than “true” or “self”, is “one”. “To forget one’s self is to be
actualized by myriad things.” Because the subjectivity involved in the
translation act is multitudinally projected, where multitude is not merely a
collectivity of some selves, a whole as a sum of its parts be they individual
or singular, but a collectivity within a self, an implosion of the self as
non-identical or anti-identical, undermining identity at the level of the
possibility of its desire. Against self-sameness in space and time, translation
spatially expands the text, placing it geographically elsewhere, and throws it
in a different time, as a second birth, in another present. Heterotopia.

The subjectivity at play in the translation act is anonymous, invisible,
foreign, inauthentic, ambiguous, multitudinal, heterotopian and perhaps, as an
experiment in subjectivity, translation belongs to pataphysics, the science of
imaginary solutions.

Thanks to:

William Empson, Seven Types of AmbiguityMichel Foucault The Thought of the OutsideGeorge Perec Life: a User’s ManualLuigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an AuthorRaymond Queneau Morale élémentaireDogen Zenji GenjoKoan